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Ubuntu 13.04 Will Be Released, Rolling Fate Unknown

Phoronix: Ubuntu 13.04 Will Be Released, Rolling Fate Unknown

At the first day of Canonical's inaugural virtual Ubuntu Developers' Summit, it was decided to release Ubuntu 13.04 as scheduled. The fate of turning Ubuntu into a rolling release distribution for non-LTS releases is undecided...

"
One such myth is that a rolling release model equals instability. This is totally BS for anyone who has used a rolling release distro in the past. It makes me lose my hope for humanity each time some moron perpetuates this myth... "
Except it's true! I mean, it doesn't HAVE to be. Gentoo has an x86 and ~x86 (stable and unstable) which I can assure you works fine, and Debian also a stable and unstable and this works reasonably well. But I've also seen it go wrong with certain projects, like "Oh, you can pull the repo for this date or that date and it works. Yeah, it's been broken for months..." instead of releasing, you know, an actual release when things are working. Wouldn't this end up just having a "stable" that would stay at 12.04 (until 14.04 comes out), and then an "unstable" that just forces you to essentially be an alpha tester? Using historical precedent, 9.04 was better than 8.04 to the point that I wouldn't have preferred to stick with 8.04. But 9.10 was damn near unusable due to bugs (from stuff that ended up being nice in 10.04 but was being developed in 9.10). Similarly, 10.10 and 11.10 were both pretty bad, 11.04 was OK a bit after it was released. This rolling release schedule would make it too risky for me personally to want to switch from 10.04 under those circumstances, I would have had a system that worked for a while (11.04 timeframe) then was totally nasty (11.10 timeframe.) This is no criticism of the developers, they are after all putting new and untested code in, as it should be for a development release. But I would like a little more control than having a "stable" (every 2 years) and unstable (whatever happens to be out today.)

Perhaps the devs should just pick some points in between when things seem to be stabilizing and pick "point releases" or whatever they'd prefer to call them, rather than strictly every 6 months? I wouldn't mind that one bit.

These problems are not inherent to the release model. It is the maintainers fault and how they handle releases. Ubuntu has shipped really unstable code in the past and it didn't have a rolling release model... So, it is not true. It is just FUD. When the developers are sane, the release model doesn't really matter...

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"
One such myth is that a rolling release model equals instability. This is totally BS for anyone who has used a rolling release distro in the past. It makes me lose my hope for humanity each time some moron perpetuates this myth... "
Except it's true! I mean, it doesn't HAVE to be. Gentoo has an x86 and ~x86 (stable and unstable) which I can assure you works fine, and Debian also a stable and unstable and this works reasonably well. But I've also seen it go wrong with certain projects, like "Oh, you can pull the repo for this date or that date and it works. Yeah, it's been broken for months..." instead of releasing, you know, an actual release when things are working. Wouldn't this end up just having a "stable" that would stay at 12.04 (until 14.04 comes out), and then an "unstable" that just forces you to essentially be an alpha tester? Using historical precedent, 9.04 was better than 8.04 to the point that I wouldn't have preferred to stick with 8.04. But 9.10 was damn near unusable due to bugs (from stuff that ended up being nice in 10.04 but was being developed in 9.10). Similarly, 10.10 and 11.10 were both pretty bad, 11.04 was OK a bit after it was released. This rolling release schedule would make it too risky for me personally to want to switch from 10.04 under those circumstances, I would have had a system that worked for a while (11.04 timeframe) then was totally nasty (11.10 timeframe.) This is no criticism of the developers, they are after all putting new and untested code in, as it should be for a development release. But I would like a little more control than having a "stable" (every 2 years) and unstable (whatever happens to be out today.)

Perhaps the devs should just pick some points in between when things seem to be stabilizing and pick "point releases" or whatever they'd prefer to call them, rather than strictly every 6 months? I wouldn't mind that one bit.

Leave a comment:

Leave a comment:

They can just add all package updates to the Pre-released updated (raring-proposed) repository for a couple weeks/month before its pushed out to everyone else.
Then its rolling but still have some quality-assurance.

++++++++++++++++++

This!

Leave a comment:

They can just add all package updates to the Pre-released updated (raring-proposed) repository for a couple weeks/month before its pushed out to everyone else.
Then its rolling but still have some quality-assurance.

Leave a comment:

In Linux, programming and IT in general there are always some myths that tend to spread because most think "they know" and know shit...

One such myth is that a rolling release model equals instability. This is totally BS for anyone who has used a rolling release distro in the past. It makes me lose my hope for humanity each time some moron perpetuates this myth...

Leave a comment:

One such myth is that a rolling release model equals instability. This is totally BS for anyone who has used a rolling release distro in the past. It makes me lose my hope for humanity each time some moron perpetuates this myth...

Indeed. Gentoo by default is boringly stable. They still have GRUB 2 marked as unstable, for instance.